How To Boot Your PC Into Safe Mode
Safe Mode is a special Windows environment that loads only the programs needed to get Windows up and running. It is the perfect place to remove viruses, Spyware and do routine Windows maintenance like defrag, and scandisk. VideoJug shows you how to boot your PC in this safe mode.
Step 2: Starting Up
What we're going to do is we're first going to turn on the computer. As the computer is booting up, we are going to push the F8 key. The F8 key means it's a function key. We don't actually want to hit the F button and the 8 button, so we're not actually going for the F and the 8. We're using, like I said, a function key and those are usually at the top of the keyboard. As you can see here, here is F8. And although this booted pretty quickly or started pretty quickly into the Advanced Option Menu, normally you would tap it kind of at a good beat. We have pressed the F8 button multiple times. We have what we call the Windows Advanced Option Menu and I'm scrolling up, hopefully I'm not making anyone motion sick out there.But if we look up, we see that we have several options. We have Safe Mode. We have Safe Mode with Networking, Safe Mode with Command Prompt, Enable Boot Logging, Enable VGA Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, Directory Services, Debugging Mode, Disable automatic restart, Start Windows Normally, Reboot, and Return to OS Choices Menu.
Step 3: Advanced Option Menu
Let me take a couple of seconds and explain what some of these mean. I'm not going to get too technical and in fact, I'm going to skip about half of them, because about half of them we really don't need to know about. Safe Mode is what we're going to go for. This is what we want to have for this program. We're going to boot into Safe Mode. But we also have Safe Mode with Networking. This launches us into Safe Mode, but gives us networking ability. Safe Mode with Command Prompt, for those of you that have used computers way back in the day, you might remember DOS or if you are a SYSKO person you might be familiar with Command Prompt. This is a very non-user friendly, compared to today's standards, environment for Windows where you don't have any pictures, it's just you typing in text.
Step 4: Advanced Option Menu Explained
The other one I want to show you is Last Known Good Configuration. This is especially helpful for those of you who are running Windows XP. If you have a problem booting, I would suggest trying to boot to this first. Sometimes this takes care of problems that just occur at random. Of course, if you wind up here by accident, you may want to go to Start Windows Normally.
Step 5: Selecting Safe Mode
But let's take a look at Safe Mode and by the way, so you know how I'm doing this; I'm using the arrow pad, right here. And this gives me the highlighted bar where I can switch my options. I'm going to go to Safe Mode and I'm going to hit the Enter button. It's going to give me an option of which operating system I want to boot. I'm going to hit Enter and it's going to load Safe Mode. This is normal. What I like to do is if I run into Safe Mode, I might start it and then I'll walk away for a little bit, come back and it's good to go. The question is why do you want to go into Safe Mode to begin with? Well, if you're having problems with viruses, spyware, drivers that aren't working, those are special tools, special software devices that allow the operating system to talk to hardware. Basically software Windows programs talk to the parts you can touch on the computer. Those translator programs are called drivers. If you're having problems with any of those things, you want to go into Safe Mode, because it loads the very bare minimum of Windows. It loads just enough to get Windows to boot. When you are in the very bare necessities for Windows, then you can do certain things like remove viruses, remove spyware. You can do other disc maintenance things such as disc defrag or check disc or scan disc or if you need to reinstall drivers, you can do that in Safe Mode.
Step 6: Entering Safe Mode
All right, we've started the computer in the Safe Mode and as we can see, Windows is starting to load. It's very obvious when you go into Safe Mode. The computer lets you know multiple times. As you can see from the top right hand sides of the computer, or top left and right as well as the bottom sides, they're going to have little things that say Safe Mode on it. They want you to know that you're in Safe Mode.
Step 7: Starting Up
As this video's progressed, I've cut bits and pieces out to help speed up the whole process. Depending on your computer, this could either be a fast boot or a slow boot. Like I said earlier, what I like to do is, I like to start it in Safe Mode and then walk away for a while. You'll get to know your computer. One of the things I find with tech support and working on computers, sometimes we can jump the gun as far as how fast we think things should happen. Patience is definitely a virtue here.
Step 8: Starting Up
Now as we can see, we have a little dialogue box that popped up that says Windows is running in Safe Mode. And of course this tells you what the Safe Mode is, which I've just explained, it's a diagnostic mode which loads basic parts of Windows so you can work with it. I'm going to click Yes to acknowledge that I read that and now we're in Safe Mode. We can see that it's not a very pretty picture. In fact if I had a background here, the background would look very kind of warped. So, that's Safe Mode. From Safe Mode I can do a whole bunch of different stuff.
Well, that concludes our little journey into Safe Mode. Don't forget, it's F8 key multiple times as the computer's booting. It's a great way to work on the computer. It allows you to bypass a lot of viruses, spyware. It's also the recommended area to do typical Windows maintenance like check this, scan this, stuff like that really does expediate the process.
